Sancho

An article by Don Quixote    2 Comments

Every great figure needs a side kick.

Today, Quixote (my computer built into my desk) got one.

Enter stage right: Sancho.

Quixote is a wonderful machine. Even though it’s nearing two years old, it’s still pretty top rung in my book. A P4 3.06 HT, 2 gigs of ram, a little over ½ a terabyte of space, dvd-burner, ATI 9800 All-in-wonder, an ATI 9200, a cool little LCD screen, and loads of fun little hoo-ha’s to make glow and look pretty.

It works wonderful as a beast and work horse. Photo files, download speeds, burning, but it suffers in one area: Gaming. The problem is not the speed or the memory, but rather with my setup. Since I have two ATI cards in there the computer has a hard time figuring out where to display the game and doing the refresh hand all that jazz. Some games work flawlessly, but there are others that no matter what I do, they just won’t seem to display full screen or at all.

This is where Sancho comes in.

Bobby & Stephanie Rothrock (the fine folks at Computer Renaissance) were kind enough to help me out. Thanks to a little work for store trade deal I worked out with them they gave me an amazing deal on a new gaming system.

They hooked me up with an Antec Aria (fun little cube), slapped my dual-layer dvd-burner in there, 2 gigs of ram, 250 gigs of SATA hard drive space, an AMD 64 3800 and an NVIDIA 6800 PCI-Epxress for some hard core rendering.

I haven’t had a whole lot of chance to play with but man does it fly. I had XP Pro x64 on it over the weekend and that thing was just smokin’ fast. You should have seen how quickly paint brush opened.

However due to some driver issues (after all it is still in beta), I’ve moved back to XP Home (but I might go back once I know the system is stable).

All in all it’s a wonderful addition to the La Mancha network and everyone is playing nicely. Hopefully this will give me the edge at our next LAN party or free me up to actually have a system I can travel with.

So here’s to some happy gaming. Doom 3 Highest Quality, here I come.